Why restaurant food at home beats eating out

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.’ That’s Niels Bohr. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘In art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’

Like physics and art, many other fields require that you embrace contradictions — because you can’t avoid them. Take innovation. Yes, a great deal of progress is combinatory: two or more technologies are combined to accomplish some hitherto impossible task. But, as the Soviet-era scientist Genrich Altshuller noticed, much innovation follows the opposite path, separating things which were previously combined. The productivity gains from factory electrification only appeared decades after the electric motor was invented when people learned to break manufacturing down into independent stages, each powered by small motors, rather than running everything off one big power source, as was the practice with steam.

Since the pandemic, the restaurant business seems to be experimenting in a similar vein. Like a Victorian factory, a traditional restaurant performs a whole host of functions at one location. It sources ingredients, combines them in a unique way, then heats, plates and serves the meal in a setting largely optimised for the sale of heavily marked-up wine. For years, the only alternative to this was takeaway or delivery, which left the customer to do the final eating bit at home.

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What we are now seeing is a surge in foodie ideas which inventively disaggregate the process. So Gousto or Hello Fresh source the ingredients in the right ratios, provide the culinary expertise in the form of a recipe card, ship it and leave you to do the rest.